Posted on

Mon, 07/21/2014 - 11:28am

CC image courtesy of Pag Asa on Flickr

A new working paper from Public Policy associate professor Manisha Shah and her co-author
Scott Cunningham of Baylor University has made waves in the media for its
groundbreaking research and surprising findings.

“Decriminalizing Indoor
Prostitution: Implications for Sexual Violence and Public Health,” explores the
results of seven years in Rhode Island’s history during which indoor
prostitution was unintentionally decriminalized.

According to news reports, the state’s legislature amended a law in 1980 which created
a legal loophole that decriminalized paid consensual sex if it took place
privately indoors. This loophole went unnoticed until 2003, when police took a
number of prostitutes to court and lost because of this unanticipated interpretation
of the law. It wasn’t until 2009 that new legislation was passed to re-criminalize
indoor prostitution.

For Shah and Cunningham, the
incident served as a “natural experiment,” to explore the effect of
decriminalizing indoor prostitution on the sex market, sexually transmitted
infection, and the number of forcible female rape offenses.

Key findings from the study –
that Rhode Island saw a large decrease in rapes and a large reduction in
gonorrhea incidence for men and women post-2003 – have been widely covered by
national and regional news media. Some reports note the fears of international
organizations if prostitution is legalized.

Shah and Cunningham say more
work needs to be done to evaluate the full spectrum of costs and benefits
associated with the Rhode Island experiment, and how to better understand the
precise mechanisms that link the reduction in enforcement and the announcement
of the loophole in 2003 to reductions in reported rape offenses and STI
outcomes.

The paper offers a number of
reasons for the declines, including the possibility that the decrease in rapes
was “due to men substituting away from rape toward prostitution.” Shah and
Cunningham acknowledge that these are currently speculations.

“Technically, our study has
internal validity but not necessarily external validity,” Shah said. “What this
means is that while we can speak to the effect of decriminalization of
prostitution in Rhode Island, we cannot take this and speak out of sample to
some other policy environment. But, in that sense, our study is no different
from nearly all studies that seek to evaluate some kind of intervention/policy
change.

Their study also cannot speak
to the effect of decriminalization on human trafficking, which is something
that has come up in all the recent press, Shah and Cunningham said. Data
limitations don’t allow them to perform a meaningful analysis of that topic.

“Our contribution to this
literature is twofold,” Shah and Cunningham wrote. “First, as far as we know, we are
the first social scientists to evaluate the decriminalization of prostitution
using a natural experiment. This allows us to provide the first causal
estimates on the impacts of decriminalization…Secondly, police agencies,
lawmakers, and prosecutors all over the US have responded to the growth on the
indoor sex market by reallocating large amounts of resources toward arresting
sex workers. This reallocation has been considerably costly for local police
since the indoor market is more diffuse and hidden. This research can influence
change in policies related to police effort of enforcement of laws against
prostitution, particularly related to indoor sex work.”

Shah and Cunningham hope that
their paper will focus research and policy toward a more rigorous evaluation of
prostitution law and policy that moves away from anecdotal work. They stress
the importance of good quantitative information about the effects of policies
to better understand the costs and benefits of various policy alternatives.

As for the study itself, Shah
and Cunningham said they were both surprised and unsurprised by the findings.

“Everything about this experiment is unusual, so in a way, we
didn't know what was more surprising -- that a state could
"accidentally" legalize indoor prostitution, that no one would
practically know about it for 23 years, that we would be successful at
obtaining so many different sources of data to investigate it, or that we would
find reductions in reported rape offenses and gonorrhea rates,” they said.

“When we started this project, we had to admit to ourselves that
we really didn't know what we should expect. Given there
hasn't been much policy experimentation around this phenomena and almost no
causal evidence on the topic, policymakers and academics haven't had
quality findings upon which expectations could be based.”

New research from Public Policy associate professor Manisha Shah gains widespread media attention.

A new working paper from Public Policy associate professor Manisha Shah and her co-author
Scott Cunningham of Baylor University has made waves in the media for its
groundbreaking research and surprising findings.

“Decriminalizing Indoor
Prostitution: Implications for Sexual Violence and Public Health,” explores the
results of seven years in Rhode Island’s history during which indoor
prostitution was unintentionally decriminalized.